Texas education board sticks to teaching of evolution
SAN ANTONIO |
SAN ANTONIO (Reuters) - The Texas Board of Education voted unanimously to approve mainstream middle school curriculum materials on Friday in a move seen as a victory for proponents of teaching evolution in public schools.
Conservatives had complained the materials up for approval did not adequately address "alternatives to evolution" such as creationism or intelligent design as a theory of how life began.
The board also voted to reject any inclusion of materials submitted by a New Mexico company, International Databases, which claimed Darwin's Theory of Evolution was not proven and that life on earth was the result of 'intelligent causes.'
"These two votes represent a definitive victory for science and the students of Texas, and a complete defeat of the far-right's two-year campaign to dumb down instruction on evolution in Texas schools," said Ryan Valentine, deputy director of the Texas Freedom Network, a liberal group that counters attempts by evangelical conservatives to affect public policy.
In 2009 in a move that grabbed headlines across the country, a more conservative Texas State Board of Education approved standards encouraging debate over the veracity of evolution science.
The board had not voted on science educational materials since the 2009 decision. Supplemental materials were being considered on Friday rather than entirely new textbooks due to budget cuts approved this year by the Texas legislature.
The Texas board, which includes evangelical Christians, had been seen as the best opportunity for supporters of Biblical-based theories of creation to get their point of view represented in public school curriculum.
David Bradley, a leader of the board's conservatives, was not pleased with the decision to allow Education Commissioner Robert Scott, whose proposals included the teaching only mainstream science, to decide how to resolve several "errors" in educational materials identified by evolution opponents.
"So we're going to kick the can down the road, and we're just going to delegate that responsibility and give it to the commissioner," he said.
The vote followed several hours of emotional testimony on Thursday in which science teachers from around the state pleaded with the board not to require them to teach what they saw as non-scientific theories in their classrooms.
Intelligent design and creationism are theories that life on earth was created essentially the way it is described in the Bible's Book of Genesis - not by evolution, but by a 'creative intelligence' generally considered to be the Christian God.
(Editing by Cynthia Johnston)
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As a Torah Jew, I am delighted the Texas group resisted the assaults of anti-Spirit, anti-G-d, antisemitic groups who distort beyond recognition the Hebrew language of YHVH in the Torah. Evolution is a process (Darwin never used the word in his 1859 Origin of Species) of speciation. There is no ‘theory of evolution’, because, being a factual verifiable process, evolution is not the question. I find it ironic that these groups’ Yeshua ben-Miriam was a fabrication of a revelatory Graeco-Roman death cult; there was never a Golgotha, ‘resurrection’ etc., by their man-god myth. Yet, they use the myth to burn books and people over the centuries, and, 1933-1945, crucifictionists attempted to slaughter my people. Their ‘bible’ is not my Torah. The discussion of YHVH stops prudently before the parallelism becomes close enough to yield logical and probable conclusions.
STEPHAN PICKERING / Chofetz Chayim ben-Avrama
Jewish Dinosaurology Researcher / G-ddess Jew
Intelligent design creationism is a “theory” in the colloquial sense, and in particular is a religion-based conjecture that does not have scientific support. On the other hand evolution is specifically a *scientific* theory – a broad explanation of patterns in the fossil record, in the biological distribution of species, and in genetic comparisons between species (among other scientific observations), with a massive body of scientific evidence supporting it.
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